On Making Documentaries

When the economy melted in 2008, I realized that I could take a rest from my practice’s residential focus. The downturn called for something different. I had time to look at what was happening around me. I had done movie projects before, so I found myself with an impulse to make documentaries on architectural subjects.

The de Young Museum & The California Academy of Sciences, photos by Glenn Lym.

HERE1: The Opposition of Two New Museums in Golden Gate Park was released in the summer of 2009. I was intrigued by the uncomfortable way that the Renzo Piano-designed California Academy of Sciences and the Herzog de Meuron-designed de Young Museum face each other across the park’s Music Concourse. By asking a simple set of questions of both buildings, the film reveals their profound differences in terms of how people move through them, how they were built, and how they present themselves, inside and out. I realized that these differences stem from fundamentally dissimilar conceptions of a museum.

If these two buildings were located outside the park elsewhere in San Francisco, we would feel their immensity. But in the park, they are scaleless. I wondered how they ended up in Golden Gate Park. And I then realized that this question was itself a compelling design story, perhaps more interesting than that of the new museums.

1894 Mid Winter Exposition in Golden Gate Park.

HERE2: A History of Golden Gate Park was released in the spring of 2010. A popular film, it tells the story of the park’s remarkable creation from sand. It describes the impact of the famous San Franciscans who funded it, then used it as their playground. Not until the elite built their country estates after the Great Earthquake did the park shift to serve the full general public.

Roos House, San Francisco, photo by Glenn Lym.

I grew up in the Berkeley flatlands, down the street from a then run-down house that was the first home Bernard Maybeck designed for his family—the first house on the block. A decade after the 1906 earthquake, he designed a series of unique houses in San Francisco, each defining its neighborhood. HERE3: The San Francisco Houses of Bernard Maybeck was largely completed before the Golden Gate Park films, yet I delayed its release until the summer of 2010, feeling that something was missing. Making the Park films helped me realize that Maybeck was creating a series of archetypes, each crafted to the specific conditions of its particular, San Francisco hillside site.

Proposed Gehry Compound, Venice Ca., edited still by Glenn Lym from the film “Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman” by Eric Bricker.

HERE4: Life Lived Through Architecture, released in the fall of 2011, stemmed from film clip edits removed from HERE3. Maybeck moved his family into a new house up in the Berkeley Hills that was later destroyed in a major hillside fire. He subsequently redesigned it as a cluster of small cottages set in a hillside garden. This progression made me think of the famous second home of Frank Gehry, in Santa Monica, and his projected third home in Venice, California. Both Maybeck and Gehry came from middle-class backgrounds, growing up in vibrant subcultures—Maybeck in Greenwich Village and Gehry in 1940s Los Angeles. Their homes reflect their architectural investigations and the growth of their families. I knew of the progression of Frank Lloyd Wright homes. And I threw myself into the home histories of Thomas Jefferson and Philip Johnson. Jefferson and Johnson both came from wealthy, upper-class families and lived unconventional lives. Jefferson’s Poplar Forest plantation, his remodeled Monticello, and Johnson’s homes in Manhattan, New Canaan, and Big Sur represent post midlife conceptions of “home” that form a trajectory from places for intense public engagement to places for contemplation and private life.

South of Market’s Dunescape and Waterways based on the 1852 US Coast Survey, CAD image by Glenn Lym.

HERE5: Eradicated Landscape, released in the summer of 2012, arose from my curiosity about San Francisco’s South of Market district, my own neighborhood since 2000. Why were so many of the buildings tilted and sunk into the ground? I researched and lectured on the creation of developable land from the sand dunes and waterways that made up SoMA and adjoining districts—a complex story of late 19th-century debauchery, mass labor, gold, greed, technological progress, and American domestic and foreign policy. HERE5 is a companion piece to HERE2. While Golden Gate Park was being created out of the western end of the great San Francisco dune field, SoMA was emerging from the eastern end—an industrial district and slum that was largely destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire.

San Francisco City Hall circa 1900, photo from San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

HERE6: The 1871 San Francisco City Hall will be the latest film in this series. The collapse of the City Hall during the 1906 earthquake is widely assumed to reflect shoddy construction and political corruption, but in fact it was conceived at a time when city government was viewed more idealistically. The City Hall was designed as a monument to the entire city. Its public entrance was built on axis with the emerging, working-class South of Market district, which it faced and towered over. An elegant carriage entrance to the north was provided for the upper classes on Nob Hill and along Van Ness Avenue. A minor food riot that broke out at its groundbreaking foretold the intense class and race struggles that would engulf the city after the late 1870s. An effective coup d’état following the 1906 earthquake ended the rule of labor politicians who were independent of the established parties. The buildings and plazas of the post-earthquake Civic Center manifest the values of the local, state, and national Democrats and Republicans who regained power in that coup.

Making these documentaries has taught me that people are more interested in landscapes than buildings. HERE2 and HERE5 are my most popular films, because they show how nature underlies the city. I think that stories about buildings are too close to home—buildings draw closer to the intimacies of our lives. We invest our immediate hopes in the places where we live and work; the stories of buildings remind us that hope is fragile and uncertain. The role of broken marriages in the progression of houses designed by Jefferson, Johnson, and Wright is potentially disturbing. Landscapes are less personal, less our story.

“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”

-Richard P. Feynman

We enter a fabric womb, a cave-like space of soft stalactites that brush against us, shifting and pooling us into groups. We’ve stumbled into the world that is Give, an installation by artists Bird Feliciano and Juliana Raimondi.

Leah Nichols is a San Francisco-based urban designer and art activist. She currently works at SITELAB urban studio, implementing public realm possibilities within a range of scales, from 28-acre mixed use developments to chain-link fence installations.

This month TraceSF introduces City Makers, a new salon series at StoreFrontLab. Hosted by Amanda Loper of David Baker Architects and Emily Gosack of Jensen Architects, City Makers grew out of a desire to hear more from the women at the forefront of City Making. John Parman, a founding editor of TraceSF, spoke with Amanda and Emily about the series, which opens on October 28 with Laura Crescimano, a principal of SITELAB urban studio.

“Carlo Scarpa, Berkeley, California, 1969,” photo courtesy of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

When one turns the page of an architecture magazine and the work of Carlo Scarpa appears unexpectedly, a quiet inner thrill is felt. Since his passing in 1978, we seem increasingly moved by Scarpa’s caress of material, his strange but faultless sense of placement and proportion, the contemplative nature of his details. These appreciations are heightened by the knowledge that his output was relatively limited. > Read More

A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley (1970), Dallas architect Max Levy, FAIA, established his studio in 1984. He is best known for designs that connect people with nature in both rural and urban settings. > Read More

Mark Hogan AIA, LEED BD+C is a licensed architect in the states of New York and California. His primary interests lie in housing, sustainable urban design and in enhancing digital design workflows. > Read More

Destroyed city of Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995. Photo by Thom Hoffman.

Our experience of the present is shaped by our understanding of the past. By ignoring the urban narratives of monuments, structures, city parks, memorials…what messages are we missing for the present? > Read More

Will San Luis Obispo (SLO) County remain predominantly agricultural, or will it sink into the same morass of rural sprawl that took out Orange County? It could go either way, but there’s still hope if we act now. > Read More

Southern Exposure is launching a public art program, The Living Newspaper: Extra Extra, the first West Coast performance project by the artist Liz Magic Laser and her collaborators, the actors Audrey Crabtree and Michael Wiener. > Read More

The stone banks alongside the river contain the city. Despite them, here is the river, rising. Silently, swiftly the waters swarm downstream; the swell of water does not much alter the river’s appearance. You know there is more of it now only because benches, parks, and the bike road are being submerged. It has not yet risen to the main city wall, about 20 feet higher; three more days of flooding expected.

Joseph Kosuth reviewing plans for the art installations at the Dog House. Photo by pm cook.

“Get out at the Sakuragaoka post office. Turn around and you’ll see a Lawson’s. Walk to it and then turn left. Walk up that street and you’ll see the Dog House on the right.” Typical Tokyo directions from the art impresario and entrepreneur Joni Waka. > Read More